Bartleby’s Book of Buttons may be the best educational iPad book available. I don’t say this lightly. There are a lot of books on the iPad that my kids absolutely love. Certainly the Toy Story iPad games would come to my kids’ minds. But that is because the kids have an affection for Toy Story. […]

Analogies for Kids is an educational iPad app that has a premise I love. It is a quiz that lets kids practice both verbal and geometrical analogies. It is extremely low tech but the questions are just great and I think they really help cultivate young minds. My dream is that one day there are […]

Here’s a statistic that is hard to believe: 93% of eight graders cannot correctly identify the three branches of government. But these are the stats provided by the 2010 National Assessment of Education Program test. The apples do not far from the tree. Adults struggle too. Surveys show that fewer than half of U.S. adults […]

Nearly 300 Kindergarten students in Alburn, Maine are getting Apple iPad 2s this fall. School superintendent Tom Morrill calls the iPad what I have called it: a revolution in education. This is just a plain good thing for these kids. But the Washington Post always feels compelled tomanufacture a debate in an effort to be […]

Starfall: Learning to Read

My favorite website for teaching children how to read is Starfall.com. Starfall is a free website that focuses on teaching children to read with phonics. My kids no longer use Starfall. But I bet I spent, I don’t know, 200 hours at least, on Starfall. My kids know their phonics well and I attribute that to Starfall more than any other website or technique to teach phonics. If you Google “learn to read” the first thing that pops up is Starfall. That should tell you something.